John Pankow

New York theatre built him. Pankow worked through Off-Broadway and Broadway before film wanted him, in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, John Patrick Shanley's Italian American Reconciliation and Brian Friel's Aristocrats, which is a serious set of rooms to have learned in and explains the precision he brings to parts that do not obviously need it.

1985 was the year the screen career arrived, and it arrived twice: a prisoner in Rambo: First Blood Part II and, far more importantly, John Vukovich in William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. Vukovich is the by-the-book partner attached to a man with terrible ideas, and Pankow plays him as decency being slowly worn down, which in that film is the closest thing to a moral centre.

What followed was a long stretch as the reliable second man in other people's comedies and thrillers, The Secret of My Success, Talk Radio, Monkey Shines, batteries not included, Mortal Thoughts, Year of the Gun, A Stranger Among Us. Then Mad About You gave him Ira Buchman for the whole run, the cousin who turns up unannounced, and a level of recognition none of the film work had produced. He returned to the role for the 2019 revival.

His best late work is Merc Lapidus on Episodes, the network boss whose enthusiasm is indistinguishable from contempt. It is a genuinely nasty comic performance from an actor most of America filed under likeable relative, and it is the argument for going back through the rest of this list.